Some Poems from the Coast of Maine

By turns exhilarating, heartbreaking, elegiac and witty, this collection of poems by Mary von Schlegell (writing under her maiden name of Mary Whitcomb Keep) traces the arc of her life, from a small child diving into the cold green water off the Marginal Way in Ogunquit to an elderly woman awaiting the return of her golden cat in a snowstorm. She returns again and again to the touch-stone of her Catholic faith, bantering with her "Angel", re-imagining the biblical stories of Isaac, the Magi and the Return from Egypt. Most powerfully, though, the poems' lucid, highly visual rendering of nature becomes a delineation of immanence.